Will Jurassic Park Be Reality Someday?

This week the newest installment of the Jurassic Park series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, will show in US theaters (be watching for a review of this film on AnswersinGenesis.org). This upcoming theatrical spectacle prompted an article in Scientific American titled “Jurassic World: Can We Really Resurrect Dinosaurs?” The short answer the authors gave to that question was no—and we don’t need to, the article claims, because birds are dinosaurs. Yes, they actually wrote that—birds are dinosaurs. Remember that the next time you put out your dinosaur (bird) feeders in your backyard!

The authors argue that reconstructing ancient DNA is no simple task, if you can even find such DNA. Since they believe dinosaurs died out around 66 million years ago, they don’t think there’s much of a chance we will ever find more than just fragmentary dinosaur DNA. Of course, evolutionists weren’t expecting to find any soft tissue preserved in dinosaur fossils, yet it has been found. This is because dinosaurs didn’t die out 66 million years ago. The fossils we have today are probably from the global flood of Noah’s day just 4,350 years ago.

But the authors do mention that they believe they now have “the overall genomic structure of dinosaurs,” despite not having any dinosaur DNA. This is because they supposedly worked “out the most likely genomic structure of the bird-turtle ancestor, before tracing any changes that occurred from then to the present day.” These “changes” include the evolution of dinosaurs, flying reptiles, and eventually modern birds. They claim to know what changes would need to occur in the DNA of a hypothetical bird-turtle ancestor to result in all the diversity of dinosaurs as well as flying reptiles and the massive diversity of birds today. That’s an incredible amount of change!

They don’t mention, however, that there is no known naturalistic process that adds brand-new genetic information into DNA. Yet they need massive amounts of additional information for new structures and functions for some kind of bird-turtle ancestor to eventually give rise to dinosaurs that then evolved into modern birds.

The claim that birds are dinosaurs (the article even calls them “avian dinosaurs”) is becoming increasingly popular. Many evolutionists will tell you that dinosaurs never died out—they evolved into birds. This absurd claim ignores the problem I mentioned above—there’s no known naturalistic process that adds the massive amount of information necessary to turn a dinosaur into a bird! These two types of creatures have massive differences (scales vs. feathers, different breathing systems, warm-blooded vs. cold-blooded, and so on) and huge amounts of unique information would be needed to turn one into the other, and there’s no known process that can do that!

There’s no known naturalistic process that adds the massive amount of information necessary to turn a dinosaur into a bird!

Will Jurassic Park become a reality? Probably not. DNA is highly complex, and even if some DNA has survived since the flood of Noah’s time, it’s likely far too degraded (even in just a few thousand years) to reconstruct a complete genome. Besides, some have suggested there are levels of complexity with DNA and the information to develop an organism we don’t know about or comprehend.

But from a biblical perspective, we don’t view dinosaurs as mysterious creatures that inhabited a world now long gone. They were particular kinds of land animals that were created on the same day as Adam and Eve and the other land animals (on day six of creation week)—and we now refer to those in these groups as dinosaurs (the word was first coined in 1841). Two of every kind of dinosaur were taken on the ark with Noah, and, after the flood, all dinosaurs (as far as we know) eventually died out for the same reasons creatures die out today (lack of resources, shrinking habitat, climate change, humans killing them, and so on).

Get More Answers on Answers News

I discussed this item on Answers News today with regular cohosts Bodie Hodge and Dr. Georgia Purdom. Answers News is our twice-weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum and broadcast on my Facebook page and the Answers in Genesis Facebook page. We also discussed the following fascinating topics:

Did climate change kill aliens—and will it kill us too?

Why do humans dominate the earth?

Have the building blocks for life been found on Mars?

And more!

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